👋 Hello, my friends at GRE Prep Club!

A key difference between GRE Quant and GRE Verbal has important implications for how you should practice Verbal. When you answer a Quant question, it is usually obvious whether you have actually done the work required to reach an answer. You either computed the value, solved for the variable, or completed the necessary steps, or you did not. There is a clear endpoint.

Verbal questions are different. It is much easier to convince yourself that you have finished a Verbal question even when you have not done the real work required to justify your choice. Because Verbal questions do not involve explicit calculations, the sense of completion can be misleading.

Consider a Quant question involving rates. You know you are not done until you calculate the rate. There is no ambiguity. In contrast, when answering a Reading Comprehension question tied to a short passage, you may feel done as soon as an answer choice sounds right. You might choose a response because it matches your expectations, echoes familiar language from the passage, or simply feels correct at a glance. At that point, it can feel like the work is finished, even though you have not actually proven that the choice must be correct.

This is where many Verbal mistakes originate. The absence of a clear mechanical endpoint makes it easy to stop too early. You may not realize that you have skipped the most important step, which is logically validating your answer. Without that validation, your choice rests on impression rather than reasoning.

So how do you know when you have truly completed a Verbal question? You are done only when you can clearly articulate why the correct answer works and why the remaining choices do not. Completion in Verbal is not about comfort or familiarity. It is about certainty grounded in logic.

Effective Verbal practice requires developing awareness of this distinction. After choosing an answer, ask yourself whether you can support it with specific reasoning tied to the passage or argument. If you cannot explain why the answer must be correct, then the question is not yet complete.

Learning to hold yourself to this standard during practice is essential. It forces you to slow down, engage more deeply with the question, and build the reasoning skills that GRE Verbal is designed to test. Over time, this habit leads to greater accuracy and more consistent performance, because you are no longer relying on intuition alone. You are finishing Verbal questions the same way you finish Quant questions, by doing the necessary work all the way to the end.

Happy studying!

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep